First, a word about the larger context I've been in for the last decade, which is Eurasia and specifically Central Asia and US policy -- and how the same cast of characters I met in that context sometimes tilting toward Moscow and bashing Washington particularly for "dancing with dictators" in this region have now surfaced again to counsel caution on Ukraine -- and more specifically, to engage in blame-the-victim behavior and even wind up exculpating the Kremlin. I promise I'll tie this up at the end.

Recently I had a Twitter debate with Reid Standish, Chris Rickleton and Deirdre Tynan about Reid's piece on ISIS fighters from Central Asia ("Shadow-Boxing with the Islamic State in Central Asia") and whether their return to Central Asia would constitute any threat of further instability, Islamization and armed conflict in this region. They offered a mixed take on this, ranging from Rickleton's belief that they constitute no threat; Tynan's reporting from the ground that they did indeed exist but solutions for this problem might be complex; and Standish's ambivalence about this issue in which he maintained that "no one could tell" the difference between reality and speculation.

I found that odd, given that the research that Tynan did for the International Crisis Group is pretty alarming -- there were 1,000 fighters from the Osh region alone in Kyrgyzstan, and this wasn't just ethnic Uzbeks but ethnic Kyrgyz as well. More than four years after the Osh pogroms, in which mainly Uzbeks were among the 400 civilians killed, I think this is a scary figure for a country where the US was forced to leave the air base, and Russia has reasserted its influence, maintaining its two bases there and keeping Bishkek dependent economically and politically.

It's not just about fighters going to Syria and making trouble and coming back and making trouble; it's what that figure means in terms of the fabric of that society unraveling from one of tolerant Islam and secularism to something unpredictable but likely not moving in any good direction.

Rickles said emphatically that the return of these fighters posed no threat. I believe it does, and I don't see why this is so hard for even this certain International Realist's school proponents to grasp, expect that I think there are a number of political tasks they want to accomplish with this take on things:

1. Stick it to neo-cons and hawks in Washington, DC and other enemies of the "progressives" and leftists who they believe artificially exaggerate the Islamic threat and use it as a reason not to restore relations with Iran, or pressure Israel more, or do X, Y, or Z about the ISIS head-choppers. I think for some, this cultural and personal internal political war is more important than what actually happens in these far-off countries. The fear of the stigma of the label "neo-con" is so great (due to massive Kremlin disinformation and propaganda and leftist hysteria) that people will go to any lengths to discredit it and make sure it will never apply to them.

2. Expose the corrupt and abusive nature of the Central Asian regimes like those of Karimov in Uzbekistan or Rahmon in Tajikistan and explain that they distract from their own tyranny by hyping the Islamic threat -- which for some is a good-faith exercise but for others (Ken Silverstein) is more about exploiting the fact of US relations with these regimes to achieve the purpose in no. 1;

3. Help the cause of friending Iran, which they really see as a solution for a lot of problems not only for America but for Central Asia, whose regimes have more or less friendly ties with Iran which is hobbled at times by America's insistence on keeping Iran at bay;

4. Stay on base with Vladimir Putin, not only because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" (American leftists have always tended to see Moscow as a counterweight to Washington) but because they admire pragmatic hard power as it makes the International Realist school's theorems come true every day -- and curbs the enthusiasm for Western power which they see as objectionable due to its capitalist and imperialist nature (that it's less and less of the former and nothing like Russia's actual imperialism doesn't matter).

Yes, I'm aware that these writers may not feel any particular affiliation with this heated think-tank war I'm compressing into some bullet points here, especially if they are in Bishkek, but I think it explains the energy that EurasiaNet writers like Joshua Kucera have for constantly blasting neo-cons and calling them "Russophobes" like the Kremlin propagandists do any of their critics. (There was that one famous fight with Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist).

But I do think the energy driving this obscure field of endeavor (there's no money now or interest in the military in Central Asia any more now that the war in Afghanistan is winding down) has to do with an overwhelming desire of the mainly leftist and liberal scholars in New Netherlands to have what the Democratic Socialists of America used to call "a democratic foreign policy," by which they meant friendliness to third-world tyrants and Moscow because these all represented more "progressive" forces than evil capitalists in Western capitals. Foreign policy, after all, is really about trying to get domestic policy be this or that thing, based on the social system that will prevail with the right alliances.

That is, they aren't just fighting the political battles of the Vietnam War, but the Iraq War, where they want to make sure everybody hears once again how "Bush lied, people died" and there were no WMDs. That most of the 100,000 civilians killed in Iraq were killed by militants and terrorists allied with Iran, Syria and Al Qaeda doesn't matter to them, because they will endlessly proclaim that the US "brought them to the theater" by the invasion.

As someone who marched against the invasion of Iraq myself, I have to say there's something to be said for this perspective, yet I've always remained troubled by the left's failure to have a plan for terrorism -- then, or now, when the people who Saddam Hussein used to put in mass graves or prisons or defeat in battle are succeeding. The Realist school is always least Realist about this ugly necessity of choosing authoritarians over totalitarians. That part of the Realist hypocrisy doesn't trouble me that much because it's always good to have anti-war forces in any society, but then, they should stop calling themselves Realists.

They wanted to keep Milosevic, they wanted to keep Saddam, they wanted to keep Assad, and now they want to keep Putin. Let's not sugar-coat this.

Of course these particular writers or the entire clan of Central Asian hands in various think-tanks and NGOs mainly funded by Soros will strenuously deny that they hold any of these views, or if they do, they are terribly more nuanced than I've put them here. I disagree, and I want to put markers down about this now, as I think it will be clear in five years how it's going.

Unlike Chris Rickleton, I think if these fighters return to Central Asia -- and they may not want to stay in a war zone forever for which they may not have a great cultural affinity in the end -- they will indeed cause trouble and they are indeed a threat. He doesn't think they are.

Unlike Reid Standish, I think while the autocrats of Central Asia undoubtedly exploit this issue to cause enormous harm, there really is a threat not only to them but their societies that we will be hard put to do anything about if we don't care about it now -- and the facts about this aren't so hazy as he implies.

Standish is very keen to disavow any "spillover effect" from the war in Afghanistan. Dozens of Turkmens killed at the border with Afghanistan don't really count as a "spill" yet, I guess. I don't know when the threshold will get high enough. For one, we didn't really leave Afghanistan yet, you know?

I don't think you have to be a crazed Islamophobic neo-con or GOP stalwart -- I'm not -- to concede that Islamism has a real chance to grow in this poor and troubled region -- and already did, which is why 8,000 people are in prison in Uzbekistan. That's a lot of people, and especially a challenge to the Amnesty Internationals of the world if they make them mascots, get them released, but they only turn out to go fight for ISIS or make trouble at home (Cageprisoners, anyone?) -- as in fact the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan really does periodically, although EurasiaNet endlessly denies it.

I've always felt it was in Moscow's interest to fan the scholars and researchers and State Department advisers with the anti-American perspective I've outlined in the four points above because it keeps them on top and keeps Washington off balance. And I think that's why, when Kommersant published a list of favoured Russian scholars who "really got it" about Russia, it contained people with this perspective like Samuel Charap or Andrew Weiss who might deny they are pro-Putin but will never call themselves anti-Putin.

But anti-Putin is what you need to declare as a political affiliation if you want to stop the tide of aggression and also even ultimately ensure business as usual of the sort Germany and France in particular like to maintain. I've never seen fascism ultimately be good for business in any country.

So, now to our betrayal of Kiev.

I've seldom advocated arming this or that country or bombing this or that country -- I remember I worked in a human rights coalition in the 1990s where some members advocated air strikes on Serbia when they saw the enormous toll Serbian forces were taking on Kosovar civilians, and I felt no urgency to make up everyone's mind on this, as no one needs human rights groups to advise about war one way or another. Their job should be to monitor its effects and the violations of humanitarian law and human rights -- which they generally do in the most biased way, as I've discovered with this war in Ukraine.

Last year, I didn't feel anyone needed me in particular to make my mind up about bombing Syria, although I could point out that had we a) stood up to Vladimir Putin b) been willing to deter Assad even marginally c) we might not have ISIS what it is today. Am I wrong?

But on Ukraine, because I've watched the war very closely, I'm failing to see why we couldn't give Ukraine drones to be able to target better (and in fact avoid striking civilians better) and anti-tank weapons, which would deter Russia's tanks. These aren't massive offensive weapons that would trigger nuclear war but would just staunch Ukraine's bleeding. Some drones and anti-tank weapons might have helped to keep one direction out of the Debaltsevo Kettle clear, at least, and prevented blatant violation of the ceasefire unless Putin really wanted to go all out -- and before the world's eyes and a lot of guys named Ivan with dashcams sitting in traffic while Russian convoys roll by -- and bring in an even huger invasion than he already has.

I personally don't feel that advocating that we do what the Ukraine Freedom Act already authorizes Obama to do -- provide military assistance to Ukraine -- somehow turns us into frothing war-mongers pushing Putin to the nuclear brink heedlessly for the sake of being right on Twitter or prevailing at a seminar inside the Beltway.

I just think it's what we should do to protect the post-Soviet reforms -- or what remains of them -- and Europe, ultimately, which is in our interests.

Could I remind everyone that to allow Putin to reassemble the Soviet Union as an aggressive nuclear state that threatens its neighbours and oppresses its citizens is what 50 years of diplomacy and deterrence was dedicated to, at great expense? I don't think we should give that up so easily.

Now, on to Debaltsevo:

There's a strange persistence in this piece not only to blame the victim -- the Ukrainians -- but make it seem as if it is intransigent and belligerent Ukraine that holds up the peace process and that somehow Ukraine fighting for *its own territory* is some sort of "obstacle to peace" and Kiev has to keep being dragged reluctantly back to the negotiations table. Ugh.

I guess that's because this piece sits squarely in the International Realist tradition that tends to look at the most powerful in a situation, see what their interests are, and then argue back from those. But why the myopia about the thuggish instigators of war in the first place? Why couldn't Russia stop, and be persuaded even by the damage of its own economy to cease its offensive against a Slavic neighbor? Why wasn't Russia dragged to the peace table in May after provocateurs fired on Ukrainian troops in Mariupol? Or when provocateurs killed Ukrainian demonstrators in Odessa, leading to a street fight between Ukrainian ultranationalists and Russian separatists and the tragedy of the fire in the Trade Union building. July, after the separatists were forced to retreat from Slavyansk might have been a good cut-off point, you know?

Why did the world let Russian tanks and troops massacre Ukrainians at Ilovaisk, at great cost to Russia's side, and only then insist on peace talks?

Of course as even the author is forced to admit, Russia invaded Ukraine, and invaded it for all kinds of reasons not mentioned here -- to hobble and cripple and "federalize" its neighbor to prevent it from a) turning toward Europe and away from Moscow's domain and b) reforming and providing an example of reform that undermines Moscow's own corrupt authoritarianism.

Other reasons include keeping secure Moscow's access to Odessa, a major port through which runs a lot of Russia's arms trades, among the largest in the world *to conflict zones*; positioning itself for an eventual land bridge to the forcibly annexed Ukraine; and keeping the lucrative cross-border trade in contraband with Lugansk Region, where there really isn't any Ukrainian border any more. Oh, and not to mention grabbing the rest of southern and eastern Ukraine -- which the Russian-backed separatists don't hide as their agenda (see Zakharchenko's speech after the latest ceasefire).

Debaltsevo is only a rail junction in theory now, as the station like 60% of the rest of Ukraine's rails have been closed since last summer due to the war and destruction of infrastructure. Investment would have to be made to restore its functioning, clear the mines said to be laid around it by Ukrainian troops -- because, you know, it's their land. Or was.

Debaltsevo is more importantly immediately not as any putative "land bridge to Crimea" or "linkage of the people's republics" although the latter is important; what's more important is the access it gives to THE REST OF Donetsk Region which the "Donetsk People's Republic" doesn't own.

The "Law on Certain Districts of Donetsk and Lugansk Regions" which came out of the September Minsk talks means just that -- only CERTAIN districts. But Zakharchenko the DNR "prime minister" wants ALL of them, and feels he is entitled, as he felt entitled to the Debaltsevo Kettle and therefore just took it despite the ceasefire. Poroshenko's rhetoric may sound desperate, but he is also right that this encirclement and forced retreat starkly reveals not only the Russian-backed separatists' land grab, but their back-up with actual Russian tanks and troops.

Ukrainian leaders rightly pointed out that between September and January 2015, Russia and its proxies took 550 square kilometers of Ukrainian land -- and now have that much more with Debaltsevo. Then it will be Artyomovsk, Popasnaya, and down to Mariupol -- making saboteur attacks on Kharkiv and Odessa now from this better staging area.

Just watch.

The Donbass began to fall in April not so much because of any "local insurgency" although there are indigenous fighters recruited but because Russia wanted to destabilize it and forcibly take it over much like the Crimea. So hundreds of administrative buildings were taken over, along with kidnapping and killing and reigns of terror in all these small towns, from which hundreds of thousands of people have now fled.

If Poroshenko tried to fight back with everything he could throw at the situation, all that would happen is that Human Rights Watch, Reid Standish and the Obama Administration would accuse him of war crimes -- and not Putin (and his supplied DNR and LNR colonels) the perpetrators of the original reason why the UA troops had to shoot at anything.

The reason this could even become possible is because of the ability of Russia and the people's republic to control the news flow and manipulate impressions of civilian suffering. This propaganda scheme - as well as continued obsessive focus on the ultranationalist units among Ukrainian fighters rather than the ultranationalists from Russia who supply the volunteers in the Donbass -- is working nicely. The Western press can't report on the shelling of Mariupol January 24 by Russian-backed separatists led by a Russian Federation colonel, in which 31 civilians were killed, without the noise of a fake story of "American mercenaries fighting in Mariupol" -- which turned out to be a British volunteer who was de-mining school-yards. The West can show up to report on the shelling of the bus in Volnovakha unmistakably by Russian-backed separatists, but the noise of incidents in Donetsk in which casualties are exaggerated then makes it a memory.

What's most strange in this piece, then, is the notion that Poroshenko, fighting against *an invasion of overwhelming force* has to be "driven to the bargaining table." Huh? Why doesn't the world see that Putin is the one who needs driving -- and frankly, despite the interests of Realpolitik counseled in articles like this, that the EU and the US have put sanctions on Putin that have not deterred him because they do not really target his main business, gas.

At Ilovaisk, Russia was said to lose as many men -- 300 -- as Ukraine did. Certainly they lost some whose deaths and funerals have been documented. So for Russia, there are consequences, too, if they raise the stakes and use more all-out force -- Soldiers' Mothers and liberal legislators began to complain and anti-war activists hold street marches. This is the same constituency that wants to oust Putin, and they have been contained only by inciting and managing movements that Putin himself has also had to curb with interrogations and arrests --, the ultranationalists in the Russia March and Sputnik&Pogrom -- or with dismissals such as with Dugin from Moscow State University.

Before Minsk II, losses at the Donetsk Airport among the Kadyrovite Chechens who came to join the "native insurgency" were also high and even led to the killing of a Russian officer by Chechens angry at their losses. It's not like Poroshenko is the only one that has to take losses in these battles. Certainly he's going to feel the political pain a lot faster and harder than Putin, but is this not in part ensured by the willingness of the Western media to amplify it for Poroshenko, but never cover it only reluctantly cover it as "unverified" for Putin? There was that one time the BBC went to visit the mother of a Russian soldier killed in southeastern Ukraine but then the camera crew was beaten up.

Was there another time?

I'm afraid Steven Pfifer is wrong (he thinks the Russians will stop now at Minsk II). There could easily be a Minsk III over Mariupol -- which is the prize the separatists will try to take next with their Russian tanks and friends from Buryat Autonomous Republic and South Ossetia not to mention Pskov and St. Petersburg. Then there could easily be a Minsk IV over Kharkiv, where despite being targeted for toppling by EuroMaidan last year, Dobkin, the regional governor, now in the parliament, and Kernes, the mayor, in power even after an assassination attempt, are unshaken because the corrupt industry of this region has its backers. Then there might be a Minsk VI over Odessa and who knows, we may get to Minsk IX over Minsk itself. Anything goes because Europe did not hold the line.

There's lots more things that could be done to deter Russia, from bringing Turkey into the EU and making consequences for the new Greek government for its ties to Moscow; sanctioning Gazprom and cutting the 25% dependency on Russian natural gas by re-opening nuclear plants and fracking and putting on three sweaters. These are all unpleasant and politically unacceptable prospects. But the stakes this time are different than just letting half the continent go over to communism, which is supposed to be merely a good idea with poor implementation that might yet work if put on by Germans or Slovenians. The stakes this time are permitting the spread of a criminalized thug-state with a national-socialist ideology. This won't stop at Narva or the continued cooptation of Germany.

Meanwhile, I personally am not going to whine about "reforms going poorly" in Ukraine for a democratically-elected president of good will who did the best he could in facing down a far more powerful and more corrupt neighbor. I'm going to keep asking where the rest of us will really be willing to draw the line at the aggressive criminality of Russia after our betrayal of Kiev.

Now, I promised for those hardy souls that actually remained for the end of this post that I would tie Ukraine and Central Asia together. Well, I could point out that it's really Putin tying them together, putting Belarus and Kazakhstan together, and being willing to go to war with Ukraine to prevent it from joining a largely meaningless EU Association Agreement.

Supposedly Putin most fears "NATO expansion" which is the biggest chimera on two legs ever since German Chancellor Merkel deep-sixed Georgian and Ukrainian members in NATO at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. Maybe he has to keep kicking the tires on NATO weakness to convince himself that his own Kremlin propaganda about "1,000 NATO troops in Debaltsevo" is utterly fake.

But it's not really about NATO, it's about other countries becoming more like Eastern Europe and then more democratic, more under the rule of law, and less interested in Russian thuggery. Not completely, of course, as Russian criminality has inroads to every single EU power, notably in Londongrad.

It's about hanging on to a base of power with very wide margins of territory -- and Putin will even go to Egypt and ask them to be in the customs union, because it's not about practicality but building up the bricks of BRICS and other anti-Western alliances of any kind.

Saudi Arabia has long been known to fund Islamic extremism abroad to keep its uneasy Western allies off balance and shore up its own theological state -- and this has worked, despite the obvious ingredients that might explode its own regime. Pakistan does exactly the same thing, and that has worked perfectly to keep its ally America constantly undermined in fighting the Taliban - Pakistan uses America like hedge-clippers to tame the Taliban but then cuts off American hands, too. These two situations (and you could add Sudan as well) have always been completely horrible and no one has ever really been able to do anything useful about it other than to call out US hypocrisy regarding silence on the human rights offenses of these regimes.

So it takes no particularly imagination to understand that Vladimir Putin does this as well. The Soviet strategy was always to fund the IRA or the PLA or anything that undermined the West and helped create the instability needed for "people's revolutions" in places like Cuba or Angola. So today, Putin is happy to friend Iran, likely eventually to sell it weapons, and friend anyone else he needs to out of the traditional list of Moscow allies in the Middle East and North Africa. Don't forget Russia was always unhappy at the UN Security Council over the agreement to bomb Libya and get rid of Qadaffi because of its own oil interests.

I think Putin is happy to allow nature to take its course and let ISIS and other Islamist terrorists bedeviling Europe succeed in undermining his Western enemies and may even help nature along in some places. Arrest some of the Chechens supposedly recruiting for ISIS, but look the other way while others go to Syria and Iraq. Let the Central Asian recruitment situation fester to keep those countries that won't join the customs union like Kyrgyzstan off balance, and then swoop in using its close long-held ties with security agencies in this region to clip its wings when necessary. Like not doing anything to stop a mass pogrom in Osh.

I'm not a scholar or blogger on MENA or ISIS and I leave others to duke this out as they please, but I'm just pointing out what is in Putin's interests, and what fits the pattern of bad KGB-style behaviour since the Soviet era. And I could point out that one of the ways they cover up this bad behaviour is propagandizing about what they see as the same thing in the West, whether real or imagined, such as the claimed US CIA running of the terrorist in Mumbai.

None of this should distract from the fact that a tyrant who essentially controls one-fifth of the earth's land surface again is never going to feel comfortable as long as the entire thing is so brittle that it might collapse and run away as it did in the 1980s and 1990s. He will do everything in his power to entrench this situation -- and the scary thing is that we are doing little to stop it.

Note: I use the spelling "Debaltsevo" not because this is now Russian-backed separatist territory but because it has (had) some 80% Russian or Russian-speaking residents, and I believe in using the spelling for these towns in the southeast that reflect their language cohort. Ultimately, Ukraine will need to have a bilingualism program and concede that Russian is a state language, too. It's important to note that there was no language rights suppression in the Donbass -- that's an utter disinformation campaign -- but the political optics on this can be what they are because Kiev did once try to pass a law making only Ukrainian the official state language, and while this was retracted and was never a threat to regions that would just go on speaking and using Russian officially anyway, it has become a political vulnerability that is exploited.

Comments

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'550 square meters'?

I think you're entirely right about Syria (the consequences of inaction), although we have been here before. I'm thinking of Darfur, which, unlike Rwanda or the Congo, is another brutal war in which some application of outside force could have saved a lot of lives.

One thing I'd point out, which I think a lot of American commentators may be missing, is that there has been a detectable change in tone towards Putin in at least some bits of Europe. In the UK, where I'm from, Cameron has been heavily criticised for his absence from Minsk II. He's been very defensive against that criticism. I've noticed a distinct shift in places like the BBC and The Guardian - see the latter's editorials for example. I have read of a shift in the German press too. And I notice that even Syriza are laying off the pro-Putin rhetoric.